At first glance this
year's London Film Festival looked more under­nourished than most. Festival
director Ken Wlaschin was so busy in early days
insisting that although the number of movies had dropped from eighty-five to
seventy-five, the cutback had not af­fected quality, that many thought he was
protesting too much. Happily, Wlaschin was right,
suspicions were wrong.

The self-avowed
Cinderella of interna­tional film festivals, London turned a mini-budget
festival into a major movie event. Crowned with a twofold touch of class from
Hollywood – A Wedding and Interiors,both well received, had
their British premieres in the closing two days – the
festival built steadily from a slow beginning to a fine finale. As usual,
"lost" cinematic countries were redis­covered (India had an
unprecedented five features), established directors pulled some rejuvenating
surprises (Walerian Borowczyk'sL'Interno di un convento [Behind Convent Walls]
), and unknown young filmmakers were blooded.

The latter were
chiefly from America. Wes Craven and David Lynch
each sent his Grand Guignol extravaganza, The
Hills Have Eyes and Eraserhead,and Errol Morris came to
present his beguil­ing documentary on the American Way of Death, pet style. Gates
of Heaven,Morris's
first film, was one of the hits of the festival and has already been snapped
up for Britain by America's keen-eyed Cinegate
distributors, Barbara and David Stone. The film is the account of a failed
pet cemetery in California whose incum­bents were dug up and transferred to
Bub­bling Well Pet Memorial Park.

The film evokes and
links – by simple addition – the
desperation and the isola­tion shared by both the cemetery entre­preneurs and
the owners of the deceased pets. It captures their different brands of
deadpan dementia – their dreams of suc­cess,
the reality of their failures – in
a series of confessions aimed dead at the camera. The failed manager of the
dug-up cemetery is bullheaded, rueful, tragi­comic. The owner of the new
cemetery and his elder son square their jaws and their self-confidence:
American Success is written all over them. Counterpoint to them is the
younger son, a guitar-playing heir apparent whose hangdog hippy cool seems to
camouflage an intimation of something lost
– perhaps
only a dream.

Gates of Heaven is hampered some­what
by its documentary structure. One keeps wishing Morris would give it the
liberating wings of fiction and see it fly higher and farther. But the film's
sidelong glances at American Success and Amer­ican Failure make riveting
viewing, and one looks forward to his next movie – a
Horatio Alger story about a boy who
makes a million dollars with a thirty-five-pound chicken.

The festival's other
revelation from an unknown director was Bapu'sSeethaKa­lyanam(Sita's Wedding). Indian popular cinema usually reaches
the West only in specialist cinemas shunned by the non-Indian. But this film
should break the pattern.

Its reenactment of a
famous Indian leg­end – the Ramayana – is exquisitely beautiful, like a
series of Indian-painted ivories come to life. The special effects have a
shoestring primitivism – conspic­uous model and
"glass" shots, an over­dose of dry-ice studio mist – but
Bapu makes a virtue of budgetary necessity by
endowing the movie with childlike sim­plicity. The result is like a Cecil B. DeMille film shorn of Hollywood ele­phantiasis. It has
already been seen at the Chicago International Film Festival and deserves a
wider showing in the States.

From Greece came NikosPanayoto­poulos'sI Tembelidestis
eforiskiladas(The
Idlers of the Fertile Valley), which proved to be the sleeper of the
festival's European films. In more ways than one. This slyly funny parable of
bourgeois in­dolence is about a family who inherit a fortune and retire to a
villa in the country. Robbed of the obligation to work, they subside into a
spiritual, then into a literal, coma. Seep overcomes them one by one. Dozing
fulsomely at every opportunity, even during meals or during sex, they while
away the days. Only the pretty, coolheaded servant girl remains awake.
Political inferences can be drawn, or not, according to taste. What matters
is that Panayotopoulos has conquered that pro­verbially
difficult artist's task of making boredom interesting and lethargy invig­orating.

Claude Goretta'sLes chemins de l'exil
ou les dernières années de Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
(The
Roads of Exile, Or, The Last Years of Jean Jacques
Rousseau)
achieves the precise opposite. It makes soporific viewing of one of the most
eventful lives in European letters. The film is about the last years of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
and it is a three-and-a-half-hour chronicle (made for two-part show­ing on
television) depicting the philoso­pher's journeyings
from one place of exile to another: his cantankerous feudings
with the French and Swiss and English – governments that refused to allow him
a safe haven in his old age.

This was the world
premiere of Go­retta's film – his first since the
widely praised The Lacemaker – and much was expected. But the
film slides steadily downhill from the early scenes. François Simon plays Rousseau with a pained, quizzical vitality that is
often winning. But he cannot carry a three-and-a-half-hour film
single-handedly, and Goretta's catatonic camerawork – one
lifeless pe­riod tableau succeeds another
– is
more like a trip through a wax museum than an imaginative journey into a
great man's life and times.

Brevity is no
guarantee of vitality, but this was a festival in which short films stole
much of the thunder from features. Those whose minds were glazing over from
three hours of contemplating Rous­seau – or, in Joseph Losey's
lifeless Les routes dusud (Roads to the South),
one hundred minutes of Yves Montand fur­rowing his brow
as an introspective Span­ish civil war veteran
– could
take refuge in an irresistibly lively program of world animation and in a
handful of British shorts that were among the treasures of the festival.

Outstanding among the
short films was Peter Greenaway's "A Walk
Through H." This forty-minute surrealist film comes from some Otherworld
of the Comic Unconscious: a world peopled by such cherishable
geniuses as Lewis Car­roll, Edward Lear, and
Monty Python.

Greenaway parades a sequence of
weird watercolor abstracts before the camera
– we
are told they are "maps" – while a serious, plummy,
British-accented voice describes his imaginary journey through them. Trying
to describe the film to someone who hasn't seen it is like trying to describe
color to a blind man. It rejoices in non sequiturs and deadpan asides; it has
a beautiful dream-comic logic of its own. The British Film Institute
Production Board, which funded it, deserves an ovation.

The British section as
a whole was much stronger than last year. Bí11 Doug­las's My Way
Home,completing
his au­tobiographical trilogy, and Ron
Peck
and Paul Hallam'sNighthawks have already
been mentioned in these pages: They were premiered at Edinburgh. But Jack
Gold's The Sailor's Return sensitively de­picts an interracial marriage
in Victorian England between a boisterous sailor and an African princess
(played with magnetic grace by ShopeShodeinde). The accu­mulating rage and bigotry of the
rural so­ciety in which they live are sketched with vivid and virulent skill.
The film was cho­sen for the festival's closing night and took everyone's
eye.

Taking the ear and the
eye was Christian Blackwood's explosive documentary about Roger Cor­man. Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel is a
tribute to America's ageless Whiz Kid of the B-movie. A glorious vul­garity
informs and inflames the film, which has hit on the happy idea of using
trailers rather than film clips to illustrate the spirit of Cormania. Myriad Corman stars,
friends, and associates – David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Jonathan
Demme, Martin Scorsese – chip in with eager homages and razzle-dazzle anec­dotes, and the sense of
euphoria lifts the film way above its documentary format into a stratosphere
of pure celebration.

Frederick Wiseman's Sinai
Field Mis­sion takes the opposite path: It plummets determinedly into the
solemn, gnomic, and bafflingly dull. Wiseman is an ac­quired taste, but even
non-sympathizers could recognize the organizing skill be­hind such
poker-faced slices of American institutional life as High School, Primate, or Meat.

Sinai Field Mission,by contrast, has no discernible organization at all. The
sleepy outpost of American peacekeeping rites that Wiseman chooses to depict
offers the nearest thing to total stasis since Waiting for Godot. Wiseman waits for something to happen. We
wait. The soldiers wait. And the film goes on for 127 minutes with­out
satisfying anyone.

A better documentary,
or quasi docu­mentary, was to be found in Phillip Noyce'sNewsfront,spearheading a trio of films from Australia. (The others
were Bruce Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom and Donald Crombie'sThe Irishman.) Noyce's prizewinning re-creation of a de­cade
in the history of the Australian newsreel industry makes fascinating viewing.
He intercuts archive newsreel footage with imagined personal drama and creates an
almost seamless collage of fact and fiction.

Special and separate section of the London Film Festival should be
devoted to eccentric curios. They were there in force at this festival. The
Hills Have Eyes has already been cited. Wes Craven mixes a
dollop of wit with a mountain of terror and had the audience squinching down and jumping up in their seats as he newly
mints every horror cliché in the book.

Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover was billed
as likely to provoke strong reactions. But the strong­est reaction it
provoked was sheer incre­dulity that Cohen could have taken so
many liberties with the lives of John Ken­nedy, Robert Kennedy, Hoover
himself, and others. The characters walk, talk, and behave like wound-up
marionettes. The chief reason the film gets away with its prodigious quota of
scandalmongering speculation presented as fact is
that its subjects are no longer here to complain.

Next in the curio department was Monte Hellman'sChina 9,
Liberty 37. Hellman, once a Corman
protégé and one of the cinema's natural mavericks, wafted from project to
project more by luck or financial exigency than by any systematic plan of
artistic evolution. No one who saw Two-Lane Blacktop could have
envisaged that seven years later Hellman would be
making a Spaghetti Western with one ltal­ian, one
English, and one American star.

The film is erratic but enormously lik­able. And one wishes Hellman would go and
teach some of the more prestigious American directors how to use the wide
screen. His compositions are unfailingly purposeful and exciting. The story
is a mishmash of comedy and melodrama in­volving Warren Oates, Jenny Agutter, and Fabio Testi in a sort of
frontier eternal triangle. Not exactly strong on narrative coherence, the
film compensates with some stirring action scenes and some no less stirring
tongue-in-cheek one-liners. (Says the last villainous surviving mem­ber of a
disastrously abortive ambush at­tempt, "This hasn't worked out well.")

Last but not least in the curio section was Wan Lai Ming's Da
no
tien gu (Up­roar in Heaven). Made in 1965, this ani­mated
feature-length cartoon from China was not exported due to political intrigues
as complex as chop suey.
The story tells of a Monkey King's struggle
against the nasty Celestial Emperor. Very popular in China, it is drawn from
a sixteenth-cen­tury Chinese novel (which itself is based on a
thirteenth-century play) and can be read, by those so inclined, as a political
allegory. But it can equally be enjoyed as a highly inventive piece of
animation, gal­vanizing the delicate figures of Chinese watercolor art into
funny and vigorous life.

Breaking more quietly across the screen was the latest of Spain's New
Wave of films. Jaime de Armiñán'sNunca es tarde (It's Never Too Late) begins eerily and edgily to
tell the story of a seventy-three-year-old virgin voyeur who conceives a
child by watching the neighboring couple copulating. As the film settles down
and the young couple learns of the wish-fulfillment pregnancy and accepts it,
a sanctifying calm steals over the nervous center of the film, and the three
begin to live together until their child is born. It's a girl. And the film
is a ravishing tale of an obsession that bears fruit.

Adela jestanerecerela(Nick Carter in Prague), from Czechoslovakia, is
an homage to the American comic strip de­tective, plopping him down in fin
de siècle Prague to solve the Case of the Carnivo­rous Orchid. It should
be funny, but it isn't. The jokes are one-track – mostly celebrating Carter's picturesque invul­nerability – and the film gets mysteri­ously bogged down in
endless scenes of lager drinking and sausage eating. It is refreshing,
though, to see a small glint of free world eccentricity informing
Czechoslovakia's generally rather dour output.

Free world eccentricity just about sums up Alan Rudolph's Remember
My Name. Welcome to L.A.,Rudolph's feature de­but, was not well
liked by London critics, but his second found a warmer response. No film in
which Geraldine Chaplin is given the
freedom of Los Angeles as a gaunt and pixilated modern day Medea can be all
bad, and with Anthony Perkins
to match her twitch for twitch, the film is
surefire simply as a quirkily updated fifties-style woman's melodrama.

Rudolph still
insists on washing music across the sound track at every opportu­nity, but
Alberta Hunter's songs are less distracting than Richard Baskin's in Wel­come to L.A. And no American
director – not even Altman
in The Long Goodbye – has quite so well
captured the air of "beautiful lethargy" that hovers around and
over Los Angeles.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE
NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.